I squeezed his hand. We could tell each other forever that he wasn’t really a suspect, but it was good to have it proved.
“Also, what lividity there is would indicate that she hasn’t been moved.”
“Probably talked her into meeting somewhere close to the junkyard and forced her to drive there, then walked out,” Dwight speculated.
“Lewes said they were questioning the owner again.”
“Good.” Dwight stood and pulled me to my feet.
“We’ll get settled in and be over around seven, okay?”
“You’re staying at the house?” Paul asked with a side-long glance at me.
“You don’t mind, do you, Deb’rah?” Clearly he hadn’t given this much thought and I had assumed we’d go to a motel. “If Cal did get away, that’s where he’d run.”
“Of course I don’t mind,” I lied.
I seemed to be doing a lot of that today.
“Great. Just let me check in with Bo and we’ll be on our way.”
Checking in with Bo proved to be more complicated than he’d expected. No sooner did Dwight identify himself than he fell silent, absorbed by whatever Sheriff Bowman Poole had to tell him.
“Jesus H, Bo!” he exclaimed at last. “Is she okay? . . .
Good. Did they find the forty-five? . . . Tell her to call as soon as they know more . . . Yeah, thanks, Bo.”
“What?” I asked as soon as he hung up.
“They got Rouse’s killer,” he said. “He’s the guy that was shot in his pickup Thursday night that I told you about,” he reminded Paul, who nodded. “Some soldier out of Fort Bragg, just back from Iraq. He found out that his wife and Rouse were getting it on while he was gone.
My people went down to Makely to question her—
Richards and McLamb,” he told me in an aside. “Soon as the guy spotted them, he went ballistic. Literally. Started shooting at them. Killed two neighbors who tried to break it up. They called in reinforcements. A SWAT team.
SBI. The works. By the time the smoke cleared, the soldier was dead, Richards was winged, and they found the wife’s body on the living room couch. Dead at least twelve hours.”
“Damn!” said Paul.
“What about Richards?” I asked.
“Bo says the bullet just nicked her in the side. She’s a gutsy woman. Wasn’t going to go get it stitched till Bo ordered her to.”
“Well, at least that’s one thing off your plate,” Paul said.
The slushy mix of rain and snow had finally quit falling, but the wet streets were starting to freeze when I followed Dwight’s truck through Shaysville, which looked to be somewhere between Cotton Grove and Dobbs in size. In the residential section, streetlights on alternate corners shone through the leafless trees. Jonna’s house was a story-and-a-half bungalow, probably built in the late fifties or early sixties. The evergreen foundation plantings were precisely clipped into green balls and tri-angles. Two dogwoods and a maple stood in the small front yard. The porch was narrow, yet deep enough to shelter three or four people.
We parked on the street out front because a Virginia crime scene van (they call theirs an evidence truck) was parked in the side driveway in front of an unmarked cruiser with permanent Virginia plates, and it looked as if the four agents were about to leave when we arrived.
“Don’t crack wise on their names,” Dwight muttered as two of the men approached us; and yes, Lewes and Clark was an amusing combo, but I was too brain-dead from the drive to think of an original comment when he introduced me, and I was sure they’d probably heard all the dumb ones.
We made polite noises at each other, then Lewes looked at us with small sharp eyes. “You heard about the probable time of death?”
Dwight nodded. “But what about my son? Any sightings? Any calls?”
“Sorry, Bryant. Nothing substantial yet.”
“Turn up any leads in the house?”
“Not really,” they said vaguely. “What about you?”
He told them about Jonna’s bouts of depression and that her cousin suggested that she might have been taking antidepressants. “But that’s probably what her doctor told you, right?”
“Wrong,” Clark said. “He hasn’t prescribed anything like that in over five years.” He moved away toward his car.
“See you tomorrow?” asked Dwight.
“Probably,” said Lewes, following his partner. “Good night, Judge.”
“How does he know I’m a judge?” I asked as we carried our suitcases into the house. Dwight had introduced me merely as “my wife.”
“Probably the same way you figured out how to get to Shaysville,” he said wearily.
“He Googled you?”
